Wednesday, January 5, 2005

And a very happy New Year to you! I had a good time away with my family. The usual: doing very little, eating too much food, and sleeping in far too late. But it was good. Just what the doctor ordered.

Speaking of ordering, those of you who've ordered from the KR Boutique will know that I take great delight in writing a little note to each customer. This works well, not only because I love to write but because I have a little... um... fountain pen fetish. When I was a wee little girl, I used to stare longingly at my mother's Mont Blanc fountain pen. No, I was not allowed to use it, and I never dared even try.

I went to France at age 15 and discovered... gasp!... that they sell fountain pens over there like we sell ballpoint pens. Thus my collection began. Over the years it has grown embarrassingly large, but one name has been missing. Until this Christmas. Tee hee.

May I present the newest addition to my collection, and the instrument with which all my KR thank-yous will be written in 2005: A Mont Blanc Meisterstruck Mozart fountain pen. Ain't she a beauty? Small, slim, and stylish, but with wonderful heft, and a truly fluid nib.

(Truth be told, some of my other pens actually write better. But it's the principle of the thing.)

Today I stumbled across a new online knitting magazine that'll be coming out soon. It's called Spun. Founder Mary-Margaret Jones explains, "We want a stitch-and-bitch lifestyle magazine — a zine that takes into account our shared love of yarn but goes even further. It would also be about music, films, art, food, travel. And there would be features about people like us."

I always cringe when I see people use the "something for people like us" description, because it's so prone to ego and abuse and it always comes surrounded by a huge, exclusive, anti-us wall.

So we'll see. But isn't it interesting that Knitty already has an anti-Knitty! Which goes to prove that even in the knitting world, we're a fickle bunch.